This Is Pop

I’ve enjoyed the three Pop Music Conferences sponsored by the Experience Music Project more than nearly any other conferences I’ve ever been to. I think this is because of the way the Pop Conference isn’t exclusively academic, but puts academics together with journalists and other music writers. The atmosphere is more relaxed, and much less narrow, than at your typical academic conference. Also, being a popular music conference, the connection between intellectualizing and passion for the material being discussed was much more evident than is ever the case at “proper” academic conferences.
Harvard University Press has just released This is Pop, edited by Eric Weisbard, which collects papers from the first yearly Pop Conference. It’s a good read, giving a variety of takes on a wide range of music and a wide number of topics.
My main complaint is that there’s far too little coverage of black music; “rock ‘n’ roll” remains the volume’s overly narrow focus. (There are excellent articles by Gayle Wald, on Sister Rosetta Tharpe; Daphne Brooks, on “post-soul satire”; Kelefa Sanneh on hip hop; and Robert Walser on Earth, Wind, and Fire; but that’s only four essays out of 25).
While there’s no way I can comment on everything in the volume, there was one issue that came up in a number of essays that gave me pause. This has to do with “populism” in musical taste. Ann Powers, for instance, argues for the virtue of boringness and unoriginality in popular music. She says it provides reassurance, which is what many people use music for. And she pretty much says that “we” (meaning critics, I think) should appreciate the virtue of any music that appeals to any group of fans; to do otherwise is elitist and condescending. She goes so far as to reproach herself for having originally despised the White Stripes because their basic appeal is to smug, self-congratulatory hipsters who in fact know nothing about music of the past, or anything beyond their own little circle of mutual admirers. She gives a lengthy mea culpa, saying it was wrong of her to “unthinkingly limit the range of fans we really bother to try and understand.”
Powers’ theme is echoed in a number of other articles. Joshua Clover pretty much equates all value judgments about pop music with Adornoesque elitism; Robert Walser says it’s a good thing that Earth, Wind, and Fire is smarmy and cliched, because what they are really about is the “affirmation of community”; John Darnielle praises “hair metal” for creating a utopian sense of equality between band members and fans.
Now, I’ll admit I am summarizing these arguments a bit caricaturistically, in order to set up my own polemic. And I’ll note before I go any further that all four of these critics, and especially Powers and Clover, are among my favorite music writers overall, because of their passion and intelligence and ability to make unexpected connections.
But still… I’m unwilling to go so far as to say that an understanding of the social dimensions of popular music — and obviously, one cannot understand pop music at all if one abstracts away the social dimension of reception, fandom, etc — necessarily means suspending one’s own judgments, and approving of whatever any group of people do.
White supremacist rock bands and their audiences are one obvious (because extreme) example; but I would argue that the fact that the White Stripes’ music and image are calculated to appeal to smug, self-congratulatory hipsters is a valid reason to despise the band; and for me, the same goes for music that is designed to appeal to Texas Republicans, or to fundamentalist Christians, or to frat boys (the latter because they are the torment of every class I teach). (Come to think of it, President Bush fits all three of those categories).
(And I know I’m being unfair to Christian music; 99% of it is dreck, but there are beautiful exceptions like Aretha singing gospel, or the Louvin Brothers’ Satan Is Real).
Another way to put this is to say that the “populism” which is so important to so many pop music critics right now is a vacuous category, because it is merely the negation of the elitism that these critics mostly fear. I have no interest in taking an elitist position, like Adorno, or like the indie rock and alternative hip hop purists who reject anything that departs a hair’s breadth from their rigid strictures. But I don’t think elitism vs populism is the right issue to be discussing anyway. Like the closely related high vs low culture argument, it has a history, but in our present media-, celebrity-, and commodity-drenched culture it is completely irrelevant and meaningless. There is no high or low culture any longer, except in the minds of reviewers for such inane repositories of witless blather as The New Criterion — and ironically, in the minds of certain pop music critics as well.
Another way to put this is to say that I don’t think the desire for originality and innovation is somehow an elitist modernist prejudice which ought to be purged from our souls. That’s way too puritanical an approach to take. (What we need to get rid of, instead, is the prejudice that “innovative” and “popular” are mutually exclusive. Where the modernists were elitist was in their assuming that innovation only took place in abstruse, difficult contexts. But today we all know, or we should, that, for the last fifty years, low-budget horror movies have been way more innovative than high-prestige art films; and that Timbaland is much more of an innovator than Sonic Youth or cLOUDDEAD or Autechre, much as I like and admire all of the latter).
Nor am I saying that we ought not to approve of anything that’s immoral or “politically incorrect.” I will continue to defend — as I have in this blog — music like that of, for instance, the Ying Yang Twinz, who are vile misogynistic assholes, and poseurs who pretend to be “ghetto” because they know that will make more suburban white kids buy their albums… but who have brilliant beats and great maximalist production.
It’s just that, with so much music out there, and with it reproducing so promiscuously, thanks to file sharing and mash-ups and remixes and iPod playlists and iPod “shuffle” settings and so on, it seems self-defeating to disavow singularity (by which I mean the serendipity of recombination) in favor of a “populism” that is as moribund as the elitism it opposes.

I’ve enjoyed the three Pop Music Conferences sponsored by the Experience Music Project more than nearly any other conferences I’ve ever been to. I think this is because of the way the Pop Conference isn’t exclusively academic, but puts academics together with journalists and other music writers. The atmosphere is more relaxed, and much less narrow, than at your typical academic conference. Also, being a popular music conference, the connection between intellectualizing and passion for the material being discussed was much more evident than is ever the case at “proper” academic conferences.
Harvard University Press has just released This is Pop, edited by Eric Weisbard, which collects papers from the first yearly Pop Conference. It’s a good read, giving a variety of takes on a wide range of music and a wide number of topics.
My main complaint is that there’s far too little coverage of black music; “rock ‘n’ roll” remains the volume’s overly narrow focus. (There are excellent articles by Gayle Wald, on Sister Rosetta Tharpe; Daphne Brooks, on “post-soul satire”; Kelefa Sanneh on hip hop; and Robert Walser on Earth, Wind, and Fire; but that’s only four essays out of 25).
While there’s no way I can comment on everything in the volume, there was one issue that came up in a number of essays that gave me pause. This has to do with “populism” in musical taste. Ann Powers, for instance, argues for the virtue of boringness and unoriginality in popular music. She says it provides reassurance, which is what many people use music for. And she pretty much says that “we” (meaning critics, I think) should appreciate the virtue of any music that appeals to any group of fans; to do otherwise is elitist and condescending. She goes so far as to reproach herself for having originally despised the White Stripes because their basic appeal is to smug, self-congratulatory hipsters who in fact know nothing about music of the past, or anything beyond their own little circle of mutual admirers. She gives a lengthy mea culpa, saying it was wrong of her to “unthinkingly limit the range of fans we really bother to try and understand.”
Powers’ theme is echoed in a number of other articles. Joshua Clover pretty much equates all value judgments about pop music with Adornoesque elitism; Robert Walser says it’s a good thing that Earth, Wind, and Fire is smarmy and cliched, because what they are really about is the “affirmation of community”; John Darnielle praises “hair metal” for creating a utopian sense of equality between band members and fans.
Now, I’ll admit I am summarizing these arguments a bit caricaturistically, in order to set up my own polemic. And I’ll note before I go any further that all four of these critics, and especially Powers and Clover, are among my favorite music writers overall, because of their passion and intelligence and ability to make unexpected connections.
But still… I’m unwilling to go so far as to say that an understanding of the social dimensions of popular music — and obviously, one cannot understand pop music at all if one abstracts away the social dimension of reception, fandom, etc — necessarily means suspending one’s own judgments, and approving of whatever any group of people do.
White supremacist rock bands and their audiences are one obvious (because extreme) example; but I would argue that the fact that the White Stripes’ music and image are calculated to appeal to smug, self-congratulatory hipsters is a valid reason to despise the band; and for me, the same goes for music that is designed to appeal to Texas Republicans, or to fundamentalist Christians, or to frat boys (the latter because they are the torment of every class I teach). (Come to think of it, President Bush fits all three of those categories).
(And I know I’m being unfair to Christian music; 99% of it is dreck, but there are beautiful exceptions like Aretha singing gospel, or the Louvin Brothers’ Satan Is Real).
Another way to put this is to say that the “populism” which is so important to so many pop music critics right now is a vacuous category, because it is merely the negation of the elitism that these critics mostly fear. I have no interest in taking an elitist position, like Adorno, or like the indie rock and alternative hip hop purists who reject anything that departs a hair’s breadth from their rigid strictures. But I don’t think elitism vs populism is the right issue to be discussing anyway. Like the closely related high vs low culture argument, it has a history, but in our present media-, celebrity-, and commodity-drenched culture it is completely irrelevant and meaningless. There is no high or low culture any longer, except in the minds of reviewers for such inane repositories of witless blather as The New Criterion — and ironically, in the minds of certain pop music critics as well.
Another way to put this is to say that I don’t think the desire for originality and innovation is somehow an elitist modernist prejudice which ought to be purged from our souls. That’s way too puritanical an approach to take. (What we need to get rid of, instead, is the prejudice that “innovative” and “popular” are mutually exclusive. Where the modernists were elitist was in their assuming that innovation only took place in abstruse, difficult contexts. But today we all know, or we should, that, for the last fifty years, low-budget horror movies have been way more innovative than high-prestige art films; and that Timbaland is much more of an innovator than Sonic Youth or cLOUDDEAD or Autechre, much as I like and admire all of the latter).
Nor am I saying that we ought not to approve of anything that’s immoral or “politically incorrect.” I will continue to defend — as I have in this blog — music like that of, for instance, the Ying Yang Twinz, who are vile misogynistic assholes, and poseurs who pretend to be “ghetto” because they know that will make more suburban white kids buy their albums… but who have brilliant beats and great maximalist production.
It’s just that, with so much music out there, and with it reproducing so promiscuously, thanks to file sharing and mash-ups and remixes and iPod playlists and iPod “shuffle” settings and so on, it seems self-defeating to disavow singularity (by which I mean the serendipity of recombination) in favor of a “populism” that is as moribund as the elitism it opposes.